The Bruise Was Another Impression
Kimi K2 (0711) and Davinci 002
The photograph arrived on a Tuesday. She'd taken it herself, twenty-three years ago, but she'd never seen the other person in the frame. It took her a moment to work out that it was an old version of herself, perhaps nineteen or twenty-years-old, wearing the kind of clothes she'd never wear ... now. She hadn't been straight then, but who was she to those women? She remembered the girls, but all was vague. Sara couldn't place the scene, but she knew it was a university photography lab.
A few days later, Sara had told Maggie and Lance. "I didn't ask then, but anyone reminded of some old girlfriend?" Sara said. "I know the answer's no, but I just thought I'd ask."
No one had an answer.
Lance and Sara had sat up late the night of the enquiry, riding their long-distance relationship. Neither but Maggie was ever brought into bed and both were aware of it, aware that the words published in a fortnight would be concrete. She'd pulled up the photo and the other figure. "I know it's the female hand, but I think it's me." The hint of a handprint, a bruise on the woman's arm, it could've been her, but she didn't recall it. "I wish I could ask the people who were there what happened."
She began to recount the tale of those few weeks of straight sex. It was a suck job in the lab, a touch on the hand out in the dark, followed by a pulled up short kiss and the fading of her light. Sara never saw the girl again. Being straight and in Plato's Cave, she couldn't have.
Lance leant in close. "I want to ask that your mana isn't diminished in any way by this." He rolled over and at last they kissed, a wet hard Texas kiss and groan.
Sara looked back at the woman on the evening of publication. They kissed, lustily and the bruise on the youngster wasn't a bruise but another impression left upon her by another woman.
Sara knelt on her bedroom chair with the back toward the computer screen. She typed. Magenta word balloons, typewritten words, a chain of white across texture.
"A woman to a man, trust,"
"a man to a woman, fault."
A woman had just told Sara. Secretly, obviously. "Men are mysterious to me," She'd said. "Just trying to work out what's going on. But women? I know what they're like. Be brutal. "
Sara wrote one more thing. "A woman to a woman, fault." It came instantly in her head, like a wired realisation, something to forget or disregard. She typed it with care and kept her eyes on the screen. The woman turned from the door.
"What are you writing?"
Sara handed her the sheet.
"It's magic. You know about magic? Planting this phrase in a population's mind."
"I know we've met before," said the woman. Sara knew and didn't. "'Scuse, but you've a bruise on the inside of your left wrist?"
Sara didn't know where the bruise came from, but she knelt forward to relax a right finger on that very wrist. The woman kissed Sara with the tip of her tongue.
Sometimes it was vertigo, as something that large passed her head◆ About the ending
❧ About the title